Optimizing Your Website from Day One Will Save You Time & Money

In this day and age, it’s not enough to have a website – you need to have an optimized website. Millions of people use search engines every day to find information that they need. If you can provide the information that they are looking for, you can earn their business. But none of this can happen if your website isn’t optimized.

Without optimization, your website simply won’t be found. It doesn’t matter how great your product is or what a wonderful service you offer. If you’re not being found in the search engines, your business doesn’t exist online.

When used correctly, search engine optimization can pull your site out of the depths and place it right where it needs to be – in front of people searching for products and services just like yours!

Search engine optimization (or SEO) shouldn’t be an afterthought. It’s the backbone upon which you should build your website. Incorporating SEO into your website development process will help you get better results from the start.

The better your website is performing in the search engine results, the more traffic you’ll get to your website. And the more traffic you get, the more leads and sales you’ll see!

Getting it right the first time can save you time, energy and money! Rather than have your website edited and changed after it’s been up and running, incorporating SEO from the start can ensure that your site gets those all important rankings early on. This can make all the difference in how well your website performs now and into the future.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

As important as it is, SEO is not a familiar concept to many website owners so here’s a short summary of how your website relates to search engines.

When someone types a phrase into Google, Yahoo or Bing searching for information, the search engines scan through the web and find the websites that are closely related to that phrase.

Each search engine has a slightly different formula for determining what “related” means – and parts of each formula are a secret. But what we do know is that using relevant keyword phrases in the website content and in the website code are both important to ranking for that keyword.

For example, if you sell red widgets you want to make sure that your website includes the term “red widgets” and has other content that relates to red widgets. This will show the search engine spiders (programs that analyze websites for categorization) that your website relates to red widgets and should appear when people search for “red widgets”.

In a nutshell, the more you prove to the search engines that your website is related to specific keyword terms, the more likely your site will be at the top of the search engine results for those keyword terms.

SEO From Day One – 3 Key Benefits

There’s a lot of value in using SEO techniques on your website from the very start, rather than fitting it in later in the process. If you’re revamping your website or creating a brand new website from scratch with a professional web designer, it’s important to keep SEO in mind.

Here are three key benefits to SEO optimized design.

#1 – You work with the search engines instead of against them.

When you publish a new website or update content on your website, within the first week or so it is indexed by the search engine spiders.

The spiders’ main job is to analyze your website and categorize it so it can properly deliver the right search engine results.

Spiders only scan a website when there is new content, so it’s important that your site contains the right keyword phrases from the start.

If you wait to update your website (called “keyphrase editing”) you’ll miss out on this first pass from the search engine spiders.

They will grab what they can from your unprepared website and your search engine rankings may never recover.

#2 – You’ll save money.

Packaging search engine optimization with your web design needs is a lot more cost effective than having keyphrase editing done at a later date. Web designers can incorporate SEO techniques while they are building your website so it’s worked into the very fabric of your online presence.

#3 – You’ll save time.

When you’re in business time is money, and having search engine optimization as part of the web design process can save you time. Having keyphrase editing done at a later point in time can put your site way behind when it comes to getting found and ranked by the search engines.

The longer your site sits without being optimized, the longer it will take to get the rankings that you need for your important keyword phrases.

Think about it this way – you wouldn’t build a new house without plumbing and electricity, so why build a website without search engine optimization?

When it comes to SEO, earlier is better. Start with a search engine optimized website to begin with (or have your redesign incorporate SEO principles) and your business website will perform just the way you need it to!

Comments

Thank you for this excellent advice about implementing SEO from the ground floor. So many site owners don't understand why it's critical at this stage.

To add to that: Make sure that keyword research is conducted so you're not optimizing for best guesses. Otherwise you're wasting precious time and energy and may be attracting the wrong customers.

Also, while it may not take too long for the spiders to crawl and index your site, this only means that they are aware the site exists. It doesn't mean page one rankings. It could be months before you start to see the site rankings improve. And even then, SEO should be monitored and tweaked for best results. It's not a fix-it-and-forget-it solution.